The need for organisations and business leaders to tap into their emotional quotient (EQ) has never been as important as it is today. The world has been witnessing unprecedented circumstances for more than a year. It has been a mentally challenging time for people and requires businesses to manage emotions along with the enterprise. While agile business practices helped enterprises navigate the erratic reality of lockdowns, fresh waves of COVID-19 and unlock cycles, human capital needs support at a different level to ensure well-being.

Across OECD countries, the prevalence of anxiety and depression has increased significantly in 2020 compared to previous years¹. Further, a survey from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention² found that 40 per cent of American workers reported a decline in mental health during the pandemic. Of these, 40 per cent said no one from their workplace had called to check up on them. And out of the people who hadn’t been checked on, 38 per cent had a higher likelihood of reporting that they were not doing well.

It is difficult enough to establish a bond between team members during normal times, which is made tougher in these times of social distancing and masked faces. These are also the times when people need to be more emotionally available for each other, whether it is supporting someone through a personal loss, discussing the strangeness of our current shared reality or helping to relieve someone’s anxiety.

It’s no surprise then, that managers and co-workers need to be more emotionally available to each other. EQ has become an important trait that leaders need to possess, besides IQ. Building an emotionally intelligent workforce needs both top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top approaches.

Here are some points to know about creating a work culture in which co-workers are more holistically in sync with each other. It’s a culture in which one’s analytical and empathetic sides are encouraged to work in synergy to guide the organisation to the other side of the pandemic.

Introspection

EQ, or emotional intelligence, is a person’s ability to sense, identify and manage their emotions and those of the people around them. Being aware of others’ emotions starts with being conscious about your own emotions. It involves being mindful of how your moods and actions can affect you and the people you work with. This requires taking a step back and observing how we interact with co-workers and react to the various situations we find ourselves in as part of our job.

Self-aware individuals are more in touch with their strengths and weaknesses. They have a better sense of how others view them, are more skilled at giving and receiving feedback and are more approachable. Also, most importantly, they lead by example.

Emotional agility

It’s a given that work requires us to be analytical. But when it comes to managing people, knowing about the things that drive them and what demotivates them is a handy skill. Emotionally intelligent people make the best use of this capability. They can switch between their empathic and analytical modes at will and speed.

It sounds like an impossible thing to do, but one can develop this emotional agility with practice. People who identify as more analytical at work will benefit from making a conscious effort to tap into their emotional side. It can be as simple as a casual conversation with a colleague where your only objective is to understand that person. On the other hand, people who identify as more of the emotional type can set specific periods in a day of complete focus and dedication to a task with an objective mindset.

Emotional agility is about being able to switch between one’s analytical and empathic sides as per the given situation—balancing the mind and heart, the problem-solver and the listener-empath.

Listening

When someone shares a problem with us, we often feel the need to respond with a solution. However, as counterintuitive as it sounds, when people talk about their problems, most of the time they’re not seeking a solution. All they want is a sympathetic ear and someone to simply listen to them.

For this to work, you have to listen to them with your full attention. That means no checking emails or no fidgeting on your phone. Listening is not just hearing someone’s words but also observing the inflections in their voice, gestures and the parts where they pause or sigh. Listening fosters a sense of belonging and gives out a clear unspoken message to people that they matter. It is also the most vital skill needed to truly empathise with the people we work with daily.

A series of studies done by the Stanford School of Business on emotional acknowledgement in the workplace³ revealed that emotional acknowledgement led to higher evaluations of trust.

Empathy

This word has regularly featured in business communication ever since COVID-19 became a pandemic. Leaders, organisations and institutions have been talking about and practising empathy. According to Businessolver’s sixth annual State of Workplace Empathy study⁴, 72 per cent of employees rated their organisations as empathetic in 2021—four percentage points higher than the previous year.

It is important to understand the types of empathy and how we can use it in the workplace. The two types of empathy are cognitive and emotional. The former has to do with putting yourself in someone’s shoes and understanding their position. The latter is about feeling the pinch of the shoes as well.

Cognitive empathy is getting a perspective of another’s situation, and there are no downsides to it. Emotional empathy, however, can affect the empathiser unpleasantly if they have the tendency to become overwhelmed by emotions. This can create a new set of problems as too much empathy may result in stress or burnout. This, of course, does not mean that emotional empathy is a bad quality, just that excess of it might be harmful. This takes us back to what we covered under the first sub-topic of introspection and managing one’s own emotions before reaching out to others.

Overall, a healthy balance of IQ and EQ is the best way to be mentally equipped to manage yourself and others at the workplace. It’s about knowing how you react to situations, how you are perceived and how you can find meaning at work, along with strengthening your relationships with your co-workers and the organisation.